SHRED IS DEAD? JOE SATRIANI SAYS IT JUST AIN’T SO. ON THE EVE OF THE RELEASE OF THE AMBITIOUS CAREER RETROSPECTIVE, THE GREAT SATCH IMPROVISES FROM THE HIP ON GUITARS, GUITARING AND OTHER GERMANE TOPICS

BY ALAN DI PERNA

Joe Satriani and I are seated face to face in a hip San Francisco restaurant. Both of us feel a little silly. We’ve been brought together to discuss the alleged death of shred. You get the picture: noted guitarist and probed journalist trading big ideas on this momentous change in rock music. Except the noted guitarist never really considered himself a shredder at all. (Although he admits he’s done it on occasion.) the journalist doesn’t consider Satriani a shredder either, and tends to regard the whole shred phenomenon as a large infected pimple on rock and roll’s buttocks – a blind-alley deviation from rock’s true path.

What’s more, neither the guitarist nor the journalist believes that shred really is dead. The journalist laments this fact. He figures that as long as there are kids playing guitar who probably should’ve gone out for sports instead, there’ll always be shred.

The noted guitarist smiles to himself, guessing that the journalist probably feels this way. Beneath the brim of a camouflage combat cap, Satriani’s soft blue eyes seem to say, "Please don’t pin this whole shed thing on me. I’m innocent!" But being a consummate musician and open-minded San Francisco kind of guy, he’s not about to wipe shredding from his rich six-string palette just because the media has decided to announce its death.

So why are we here at all? because Joe’s new album seems to invite – maybe even demand – a re-evaluation of the shred era. Time Machine is a retrospective double CD covering Satriani’s first decade as a recording artist. It stretches back to his first record, the 1983 EP Joe Satriani. There’s a whole disk devoted to the guitarist’s impeccable live work, plus previously unreleased studio tracks from Surfing With The Alien and The Extremist sessions. Kicking off the collection are three brand-new tunes that reunite Joe with his Alien-era band, bassist Stu Hamm and drummer Jonathan Mover. Just about every selection on the CD offers up a fresh reason why Joe Satriani transcends the "shredder" tag: his pop-inflected sense of melody, the jazz sophistication on his harmonic sensibility, his dedicated pursuit of tone in both its purest form and its most experimental extremes….

Yet there’s no denying that, for the general listening public, Joe Satriani is shred. Until he came along, no guitarist since Jeff Beck and his Blow By Blow had taken rock-style instrumental music to platinum pinnacle of mass culture recognition. But that’s a precarious spot to be in. Because while shred hasn’t exactly died, there’s non denying that its status has changed of late. It has slipped from the center of the guitar universe. Will Satch slip with it, brought down by the decline of a musical movement that he never really belonged to? Or will the public continue to value the broader musicality of his work? He’s naturally hoping for the latter, but he’s determined to stick to his blazing guns no matter what.

GUITAR WORLD: How has the whole shred phenomenon affected your career?

JOE SATRIANI: I always try to look on the bright side of things. The atmosphere of people wanting to listen or to talk about or photograph shredders gave me a way of introducing myself, "Well, i may be not exactly just a shredder, but part of what I do is that." It depends on the definition of "shred."

GW: Which is something I though we might discuss.

SATRIANI: The way I look at it, if you really play your guitar with attitude and you don’t care about any rules or boundaries that are temporarily set up by commercial considerations, then you’re a shredder. That’s why Neil Young is a shredder. Or Smashing Pumpkins – that’s shred guitar music. They’re nothing like Allan Holdsworth or John McLaughlin, but I see the same attitude there. When McLaughlin is doing a piece, he just wants to play. He loves to play and what filters though is his love of the instrument and desire to break down any boundaries that exist. I hear it ion the same way in what may be more popular now – the outgrowth of alternative music. It just takes a different sonic form.

GW: That’s a broad definition of shred. But there’s also the narrow definition.

SATRIANI: Which is?

GW: Oh, divebombing, tapping, the need to have a Floyd Rose…that whole limited vocabulary of tricks that some guitarists latched onto in the Eighties.

SATRIANI: People always zero in on the most tangible thing a guitarist does and then say that’s his style. If I put out a record with ten songs, maybe only three will have tapping. But there’s no doubt that those three are what will be written about. They’ll say, "Oh, he’s a tapper." Which is obviously ridiculous. For me tapping is just one more way to express myself. I’m sure there are a e people who use it poorly, to show off. But most players don’t. That’s my feeling. Most good musicians that I know about, that I listen to, impress me with their taste.

That real fast, billion-notes-a-second stuff you hear guitarists do – to me that isn’t shred. I mean there’s some fast playing that is real shredding. Whether it’s John Coltrane or Eddie Van Halen doing it, you can tell when the real shredding is going down. But then there’s the other stuff that just sounds like scales. Some people might say there’s a fine line there, but I don’t think so. I think it’s quite painfully obvious when someone’s practicing through an amp, as opposed to someone who’s really laying down some stuff that just happens to be fast.

GW: One reason I think you’re beyond the shred category is the variety of musical styles you’ve embraced down through the years.

SATRIANI: Yes. In 1979 I got together with some friends of mine and formed the Squares. We were three guys coming from very different places musically. But we passionately believed we could fuse our individual approaches. That meant everyone had to cast off something he’d been working on. I gave up the whole idea of trying to throw important guitar passages into the songs. I said, "The hell with it. If the solo needs to be just an A chord hit six times, then that’s what’s the solo’s going to be." But the Squares never really fit in. We weren’t rock enough. We weren’t alternative enough. We weren’t new wave enough and we weren’t punk enough. Maybe we just weren’t the right people for the band.

GW: One reason I raised this point is that new wave pop seems so diametrically opposed to shred aesthetic.

SATRIANI: But I think it was a good thing for me. I don’t think I would have come up with Joe Satriani, the avant-garde all-guitar EP, if I hadn’t been working in such a restrictive format: playing the clubs and doing four bar solos. The whole Squares thing was just total punk energy – but without the spitting. We had a lot of fun. I had a great two-Marshall wall of sound.

GW: Surfing With The Alien has some of that retro-surf, B-52s-ish, new wave quality. Were you striving to recast your instrumental prowess in that kind of post-punk mold?

SATRIANI: Yes. I felt there was a way to do it. Because once I got into playing that kind of music with the Squares, I realized, "Wow, it’s not really just a small, confining room that I’m playing here – it’s a whole new world. It’s just that I haven’t maybe approached it creatively before." So once I got into it, I started trying to expand it.

GW: "Speed Of Light" [a previously unreleased track from the Extremist sessions] could almost be an Ultravox song!

SATRIANI: Yeah, there’s part of my musical vocabulary that’s been drawn from modern sources. I think some really great stuff came out of certain bands in the Eighties. You look at an artist like Billy Idol, who might be kind of hard to figure out these days. But you can pick out a couple of songs that he did – with Steve Stevens or whoever – and see that he hit on something that will always be viable to people as a form of driving rock music. You can say the same thing about the Gang Of Four and their song "Anthrax." [nothing to do with the band of that name – Ed.] That made such an impression on me; the guitar sound and the groove…the whole attitude was just great. There are certain bands, like them, that I only liked certain songs from.

Those things are right up there with reams of blues tracks that I’ve memorized, and bebop songs, and swing tunes and regular heavy metal. It’s all really a part of me. So when I do a song like "Speed Of Light," those things start coming out. You might hear a little bit of Ultravox or Gang Of Four in there. But I might lay a guitar on there that sounds like Joe Walsh at 200 miles-per-hour. Because like Joe Walsh too.

GW: What would you consider to be the "dawn of shred," historically?

SATRIANI: Well I’m a fan of musical history, so I go back hundred of years. There must have been shredders all throughout time.

GW: Paganini types?

SATRIANI: Yeah. Franz Listz. There are all different types of shredders. Mozart was a freaky kind of shredder. And you have to consider Bach a shredder just because he was really pushing the envelope in terms of showing how you could use every key on the keyboard. and you could say that Arnold Schoenberg was a shredder because he came up with 12-tone music. But if you’re talking about playing fast rock guitar and making an aggressive noise, I’d hat e to have to pin down one person who originated that. If I know me, it probably happened and I wasn’t aware of it, and then I caught on slowly.

GW: The general consensus around Guitar World is that the Prehistoric Period of Shred is like Alvin Lee, Eric Clapton on Live Cream….

SATRIANI: You don’t consider Hendrix a shredder?

GW: Personally, no. Hendrix was a great psychedelic guitarist.

SATRIANI: I think I understand. The guitar must sound slightly like a Vegematic in order for it to be shred.

GW: Well, yeah.

SATRIANI: Hmmmm, even before Jimi Hendrix, Alvin Lee or Live Cream there was really though shred, like Roger McGuinn playing "Eight Miles High" [The Byrds’ Fifth Dimension, CBS, 1966] That’s shredding all right, but it’s like, "Hey buddy, sharpen your blades!" That’s a great solo but you can really hear the rough edges. But then it’s hard to flat-pick a 12 string guitar. But when I think back, if you’re talking about guys who really picked fast and tried to cram a lot of notes in, it’s hard to say.

GW: It seems to have happened around the birth of heavy metal. You sure don’t think of people like Scotty Moore [Elvis Presley’s guitarist] ever doing that.

SATRIANI: No. They had more of a commitment to the tone of the guitar. You know, this is a really good question when you come down to it. Who was the first to just blatantly go bananas?

GW: I’m telling ya, Alvin Lee.

SATRIANI: Ten Years After [Lee’s band] put out a record called Undead that I thought was great.

GW: That and Stonehenge are my favorite Ten Years After albums. Forget that post-Woodstock crap they did: those records are where shredding began. It was really in1969, with the Woodstock festival, that the last vestiges of underground Sixties rock culture got turned into something blatant, dumb and obvious enough for mass suburban consumption. That began heavy metal. Heavy metal began shredding. And here we are today.

SATRIANI: Well I don’t know…There were a lot of players around in the Sixties who just came out with nice tone. But I’m having a hard time remembering the guys that just were blatantly blazing away. Though I’m sure they were there. I don’t know, I’m stumped into this question.

GW: All right, let’s move on. Was the "death of shred" issue a consideration for you when you chose the material for your new album? Did you want to stay away from that side of things?

SATRIANI: Come on! Of course not. When I hear people say that, I just laugh. It’s ridiculous. I don’t think there’s any more or less playing that way now than there were before the craze and the word "shred" began to be bandied about. It’s like when people say "the blues are back" or "the blues are dead," or "jazz is back". It never went anywhere; the focus just shifted away from it a second. But, meanwhile, the people who were playing it kept on doing it. I assume most guitar players are like me. They’re playing, having fun; then they get a magazine in the mail that says "Shred is Dead" and they say, "What the hell?" They throw it away and keep on playing.

GW: So it’s just a media thing for you?

SATRIANI: Yeah. Record companies and producers may be more affected by it. Because they’re the people in the industry who are more subject to trends – they try to capitalize on trends. But it seems to me that the real musicians try to stay away from eve being affected by them. They say, "Hey dig me. I’ll always be here. I’ll always do my thing. If you don’t want to dig me now, dig me later." [laughs] To me, that’s the safest thing to do, artistically and musically. They may disregard you for a while, but when they come back, if your main thing was being a shredder, they don’t want to hear that you’ve stopped being a shredder; they wanted you to keep on shredding while they went away. And when they come back, they’ll expect you to be the same shredder again. So you might as well do what you want to do. That’s my observation about professional entertainment life.

GW: Is a high degree of technical virtuosity aesthetically appropriate to rock music?

SATRIANI: In years to come, what is currently not regarded as good technique at all – or not even regarded as real technique – will be understood as real technique. And what is currently blasted as overly technical will be seen for what is really is, which is instructional sounding: practice-like. When some people play a fast solo, it’s like they’re showing you how they learned the scale or the technique that goes with playing it. The methodical nature of how they went about acquiring the technique becomes apparent, you know? Some people are just like that. Some people naturally gravitate towards order.

GW: But isn’t rock and roll about disorder? Isn’t it about being 15 and fucked up? A misfit? An anarchist?

SATRIANI: Maybe there is some truth to the notion that the more you wail on a song the more rock and roll it becomes. But I think rock and roll was rock and roll for just the blink of an eye. After that, everyone scrambled to define it: What was rock and roll? When was rock and roll? Everything I play probably has nothing to do with Scotty Moore. You know that Jeff Beck record that just came out? [Crazy Legs, Beck’s tribute to rockabilly’s Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps.] Maybe that’s what rock and roll was. Maybe what Hendrix did had nothing to do with it as well. Maybe rock and roll is so old we should just come up with a new word.

GW: But a certain attitude has carried on down through the years that has a lot to do with rock and roll.

SATRIANI: Yeah, well there’s rock and roll in hip hop, there’s rock and roll in pop music now. There’s rock and roll on Broadway. It’s like a disease, you know.

GW: What contributions, if any, do you feel shred has made to electric guitar design?

SATRIANI: Good question. First of all, let me say that it has produced its share of really ugly guitars. Sometimes you think that after 1958 nothing worthwhile ever happened to the guitar. The Floyd Rose certainly offers a lot of expressive possibilities, but I’m sure a lot of guitarists have told you about their bars coming right out of the saddles, the pots breaking out of the bodies… To a certain extent, the Floyd Rose might be a dead end. You may never be able to get one to operate perfectly and combine it with a beautiful sound of an instrument that has strings going through the body. If a guitar has a Floyd Rose, it’s going to take the tone away from what a standard guitar sounds like. But it’s going to add things that standard guitars don’t have. I think it’s best to see it not as a further development of the standard guitar, but simply as an offshoot.

It terms of pickups, I think shred has had a great impact. I’ve certainly benefited greatly from that – in the form of the Fred pickups. I’d been looking around for something and Steve Blucher of Di Marzio just happened to have that for me. I think originally he was trying to respond to guys who were shredders. We took what he developed for them and modified a little for my purposes. The Fred pickup helped me get my melodies to speak more clearly against the rhythm guitars. That was always my problem. If I’ve got rhythm guitars, how do I get an additional lead guitar to sound unique, to come out like a voice? The solution to that problem didn’t exist 10 years ago.

GW: If some of the shred-relates innovations hadn’t come along, would you still be able to do what you do?

SATRIANI: Oh, yeah. There isn’t really a whole lot of crazy wang bar stuff on Not Of This Earth. And certainly if you listen to some of the brand new songs on Time Machine – "The Mighty Turtle Head" and "All Alone" – those songs don’t have any bar on them: they were done on a new prototype guitar that I’m working on. It reflects a growing trend that started with the Extremist record, where i was using an Ibanez JS6, which has no vibrato bar – pretty standard guitar.

GW: So these shred-related guitar innovations haven’t pushed you in that direction, stylistically.

SATRIANI: Not at all. Long before the invention of the Floyd Rose, I started out playing a Hagstrom III, which had a very unique wang bar system. And that’s where I really went crazy and developed a lot of the wild things I do with a bar. I used nearby objects – like a table or a wall – to manipulate the bar while I was playing with two hands. But then I reached a point where I didn’t want to touch a bar again. I switched to a ’54 Strat with a standard tailpiece, and then to a series of Les Pauls and Telecasters, I didn’t go back to the wang bar for 10 years – not until the Joe Satriani EP.

A similar thing happened with wah wah. Back in the seventies, I put my wah wah pedal away, thinking I’d never use it again. But I took it out for Surfing With The Alien, never thinking I’d end up using it on the title track. But I found I played it completely different than I had before. Which taught me a valuable lesson about myself: Sometimes I get my fill of things and need to put them away.

So it’s cool to have all this new technology come out. It’s not like you’re endorsing every new device and saying you want to use it on everything. But it could work as a component in a particular song. I don’t fear technology.

GW: What do you make of the grunge phenomenon. Is it the antithesis of shred?

SATRIANI: I can’t logically see it that way. I listen to these bands and I know some of the guitarists. They want to play guitar as well as they possibly can; their mode of expression just happens to be a little grungier. I really believe that the press views these grunge bands in terms of this conspiracy theory: grunge vs. shred. Now, I know these guys love to wind up the press. And maybe they have nothing else to talk about. So they say, "Oh yeah, you’re right: I hate that shred guy you mentioned. I hate all those guys. I’m cool." I mean what do you expect them to say?

GW: I agree. A lot of the grunge guys just seem to be heavy metal players, which is what the shred guys are.

SATRIANI: Yeah, and as they learn how to play better, which they will, they’ll get accused by the next wave of playing too many notes or whatever.

I think that something you have to understand when you think about where guitar playing is going today is: it’s going everywhere at the same time. It’s not like there’s just one line of exchange; there never is any of the arts. There are always millions and billions of things happening at once.

GW: Assuming that shred now does have a less central place in the media and in pop music culture, is it ever going to be big again?

SATRIANI: I couldn’t say. But I’ll tell you one thing: I will always play the shit out of my guitar. Whether or not the community wants to call that "shredding," and whether they’re focussing on shredding or not, it’s not going to have an impact on how I make my music. Obviously it might have an impact on how my music does in the marketplace. But I won’t be making a record just to fit. I won’t be making a grunge record or a gansta record.

GW: So we won’t see you coming out in a 24-inch-high ski cap?

SATRIANI: No. I keep my ski caps to a minimum height. Although I’ve heard that the higher your ski cap is, the closer you are to God.

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